Medicine in the 24th century

You wouldn't lose memories that's just fake news. People have been using transporters for years in Trek

 

I believe you're thinking of the movie Generations.

 

let me highlight it for you...

 

Yeah you keep a copy but copies in the buffer don't last long unless you did the thing Scotty did in Relics and even that isn't guaranteed to work properly.

 

Well, technically or technologically they wouldn't be, necessarily, but they'd certainly appear to be less of a vulnerability. They're integrated parts, for one. Let's also remember that without a visor he's more vulnerable in itself, & situations like losing it go away with integrated components, but also, the mere fact that it isn't some obvious trinket to be messed with by enemies also has advantages. It's much less obviously a weakness for him to get marked with. It was actually the optical ports that made him a target for the Rommies, & those are gone too. He's much less different on the surface than the rest of the crew now, to be singled out

Well his hacking lost the ship most recently. It's obvious to me at least if we next see him without a visor, it's probable that he was recently thinking it was a vulnerability, & thinking back on the events of The Mind's Eye would confirm that for him... plus every damn time he was blinded by it falling off

Well, high tech? Is debatable. Certainly possesses superhuman capabilities though

Maybe not micro/telescopically or functionally as amazing as Geordi's vision. However ALL his other functions & senses, while being humanlike are endowed with better than human attributes, including his vision, as we see in his wider "visual detection threshold" from Timescape.

So he certainly had perfect human vision, which would be a useful aspect for Geordi, but he also had more, & maybe... maybe more could've been added, to both advance & secure them.

 

...Except in ST:INS, suggesting Soran could have yanked them out either as easily as he did the VISOR, or then almost as easily but with a bit of extra gore.

True - and that's the crucial thing, rather than the exact shape of the vision device. Pulaski seemed to think the replacement of the eyes a triviality, the real task being the repairing of the optical nerves. If those have been repaired now, LaForge really might be objectively better off. But his new contact-type VISORs would presumably need an interface of some sort, too. It's not his natural eyes because those aren't fixed in ST:INS yet before the Fountain of Youth does its trick. But even if it was exactly that, a malicious force could do the very same sort of interfacing as the contacts do, and as the VISOR band originally did; that this would be harder to do in the contacts case is a rather wild assumption.

True again. But the last time something like this happened, he didn't have himself fixed. Data never did, either, after his assorted bouts. Or O'Brien, Troi or Riker, after "Power Play". I'm not sure this would be a particularly strong motivator for LaForge.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'd think the strongest motivator would be just getting fed up that the visor keeps falling off all the time lol, but those other events likely spurred him a bit too

Oh... Yeah, & I also agree that any "integrated" part on anybody is only as integrated as the determination of your attackers' willingness to de-integrate them... Ewwww

But it's not so much that the implants are quantifiably less hijackable, just that the integration makes them a lesser tagert to be noticed on literal face value. I do agree he must still have some bionic interface that's just as easily accessible as the visor, but if no one is outright noticing it as easily, the presumption of security is better at least. A more disguised/concealed interface is by nature more secure, than a contraption & glowing ports on his head, no?

I still bet LaForge felt more secure with the implants, which was probably at least one of the factors in the upgrade, among some others too I imagine.

 

You're most likely right, and in my memory I mixed it with the time they projected his visor-vision to the viewing screen in season 1.
But in general I think they were very inconsistent about how similar Geordie's vision was to standard human vision, or what other wavelengths he could see with it (seeing the painted symbols on playing cards, recognizing Leah Brahms from her hologram, not being able to see the radiation and overheating in that wall in Disaster etc.)

Though if we go with the version of Geordie's vision that has him see only in those heat-vision-like colour blotches...then it really doesn't make sense. Considering the feats we see 24th century medicine achieve on a regular basis,his visor, by all means should provide him with standard human vision + being bale to see ultra violet with additional modes that include infra red vision, several forms of night vision, etc. etc. etc.

 

I remember an episode where he was captured by Romulans and his vision was those heat coloured blotches, yet he could distinguish who was who, and watching that episode again I just keep wondering how he trained himself to make any sense of that.

 

Why would this be a problem? He was born blind, and apparently got the VISOR at an early age. A young brain would learn to treat the VISOR output as perfectly natural.

Nothing ever remotely suggested that LaForge would be unable to see the visual wavelengths. He just sees so much more, and loves it that way. He has never had any trouble seeing like we do, not after getting the VISOR. He just doesn't see the point of being so horribly handicapped. Except as a perverse delight every now and then, much like one of us might enjoy being blindfolded for a single evening but not for the rest of his or her life.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The most surprising thing about medical technology in Star Trek is that they cured virtually every disease plaguing the 20th/21st century man, but couldn’t cure male pattern baldness.

What a drag.

 

My take on the Generation's version of Geordi's POV is that it's not Geordi's POV, not his actual visor feed, that is. It's a low tech recording device hidden somewhere in it, a camera.

That's why it differs from his vision in The Mind's Eye, & Heart of Glory. It's not, nor does it need to be to accomplish the objective

 

Except the episodes where he can't see in standard human version, such as his statement in the episode where Riker got Q powers, gives him biological eyes and he's like "Oh Tasha, I could always only imagine how beautiful you must look!"(or something to the effect, I don't have the script of any episode memorized)
TNG was inconsistent about what types of vision.

 

Indeed.

Not everybody wants hair. Some of us just enjoy being bald.

Hell, I'd love it if I didn't have to shave every morning...

 

He doesn't even want his new robot body to be too roboty...

 

That - or then Soran, the tech wizard, had little trouble filtering the raw signal to meet the needs of his Klingon goons.

This I'd attribute to the "blindfold in bedroom" thrill - even more obviously here than in ST:INS where LaForge only looks at a sunrise...

FWIW, the exact quote: "You're as beautiful as I imagined, and more." Basically a variant of "Yeah, you always looked good in office garb, but this one really flatters you"?

I wonder about the "All Good Things..." eyes. They look different from the ST:FC ones, which apparently are some sort of contacts over his biological, nonfunctional orbs (since in ST:INS they apparently pop off with minimal gore and reveal healed orbs beneath). But not that different. Possibly a more advanced version of the devices of ST:FC/INS/NEM, and indeed part of LaForge's project to look less conspicuous in the aftermath of ST:GEN, just as Mojochi says.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The visor was so advanced in S1 that they even sent Geordi off the bridge to look at the Edo station through a window to check for things the sensors wouldn't detect, IIRC XD

Gene allegedly said that in the 24th century, no one cares.

 

You can pretend it is that way, but the intention of the script is clearly that he can't see the way humans see, and that's the gift Riker gave him (otherwise there'd be no reason to change his eyes).
And no, it clearly implies that he sees Tasha like she is for the first time, he could probably imagine what she looks like, since he was blinded as a child and can still remember the way women look in "standard vision"
I agree that later episodes forgot about this and/or implied that Geordie can see like a non-vision impaired human and more...but at that point in time, the intention of the writers was that he couldn't

 

It's more like the writers of "Hide and Q" forgot what LaForge's vision is supposed to be like. No, he's not blind - all the other characters are, or nearly so. He has always been able to see everybody around him. So no, he isn't seeing Yar for the first time, by any standards.

This is the first time LaForge sees how a blind man would see Yar - like she really isn't. Yeah, LaForge likes what he sees. But he already knows what Yar looks like; here he's enjoying a mere silhouette. As opposed to all those TNG episodes that preceded this one, and all those that followed this one.

So yeah, we may treat it as an inconsistency. But it's not a premise. It's a brief hiccup out of the premise. And then back.

Timo Saloniemi